8 tips successful PR pros follow

One of the reasons I opted to get a degree in public relations is because I didn’t want to follow in my successful father’s footsteps.

He was a salesman—or as he liked to call himself, a peddler—and I wasn’t the least bit interested in sales as a career path. But while I worked on my degree, nobody revealed that I was starting a career in sales. That quickly changed.

1. In PR, selling is everything.

It didn’t take long after I stepped into my first job to figure out that selling is just about everything in PR. I may not sell valves and regulators as my dad did, but I peddle ideas, concepts, and sometimes even products.

You can talk about convincing or persuading all you want, but trust me. When you accept that a job in PR is a job in sales, you’ll move ahead in your career much faster.

2. Selling is solving problems.

My dad was a very successful salesman, and eventually owned a company. He always gave some credit for that to a Dale Carnegie course he took when he moved from an engineer to a sales engineer. He said it taught him that selling was about satisfying people’s needs.